Enterprises often offer families of electronics products ranging from low-end (or midrange) systems to high-end systems. In general, low-end and midrange systems provide less performance than do their high-end counterparts, particularly because such systems typically have less memory, fewer processors, and fewer I/O (input/output) expansion capabilities. Accordingly, low-end and midrange systems generally cost less than their high-end counterparts cost and, therefore, usually serve as entry-level systems. Customers, however, often outgrow the performance of their entry-level systems and seek to upgrade.
To offer a range of products, enterprises usually have different product designs: entry-level and high-end systems regularly have different processors, core logic chip sets, types of memory, memory speed, and system enclosures. These various differences typically impede in situ and non-disruptive upgrades from an entry-level system to a high-end system. To perform a system upgrade, customers generally need to remove and replace the existing enclosure (i.e., the entry-level system) with a new enclosure (i.e., the high-end system). This removal and replacement of the entry-level system invariably causes downtime to the customers' operations because during the replacement there can be no access to the data stored in the I/O modules.